…opportunities open for for investments, crop exports
After an initial spark of enthusiasm, the Federal Government appears to be foot-dragging concerning the need to increase food production and lower prices through the deployment of the nation’s 264 dams for farm irrigation to facilitate year-round cultivation and harvests.
This is as public opinion builds up in this direction and concerns continue to mount across the nation over the rising cost of daily needs, especially foodstuffs.
Last Tuesday, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) president, Joe Ajaero, said the union’s recent protest was more about hunger than a call for an increase in the Federal Government’s stipulated minimum wage.
The Federal Government had said last October that it had concluded arrangements to partially commercialise all the dams under the nation’s 12 river basins to enable them effectively deliver their mandates.
Minister of Water Resources and Sanitation, Prof. Joseph Utsev, had disclosed this while addressing newsmen shortly after inspecting the Tiga Dam in Bebeji Local Government Area of Kano State, but little has been heard of the project since then.
The minister had said that the commercialisation of the basins would enable them to generate more revenues for the Federal Government.
He gave the assurance that the huge infrastructure available at the basins would guarantee a return on investments.
Utsev explained that the exercise would ensure sustainable operations and management of the infrastructure at the dams.
“The basins have huge infrastructure like water supply schemes, dams, and irrigation that require good funding to be able to keep them running and to provide dividends for Nigerians,” he said, adding that the Federal Government was ready to partner with commercial farmers to pave the way for massive production of assorted food crops in an all-year farming system.
Meanwhile, industry groups have said that better attention to the nation’s 264 dams which are currently poorly applied to crop irrigation would open a window to increasing food production and lowering prices.
“Farmers in Nigeria have been impacted by the lack of access to water to the extent that there is no real enabling environment for sustainable all-year-round agricultural production in the entire country,” said Ibrahim Kabiru, national president of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria.
Despite the push for increased local food production, most dams across the country are still dysfunctional and irrigation schemes are not working, Kabiru said.
Experts say Nigeria’s several dams will boost food production, lower prices to table and reduce dependency on food imports if properly serviced and managed.
They add that food production would increase significantly, as cultivation and harvesting could be conducted twice a year for some crops and three times a year for others, especially as many crops grown in the country, including maize, beans, tomatoes and other fruits, vegetables and some varieties of legumes, mature in three months.
Dams that provide irrigation year-round would further attract investment into mechanised farming and food processing from home and abroad, as well as create jobs and encourage foreign exchange earnings from food and other farm produce exports, they say. There would then be opportunities and incentives for increased levels of fish farming.
“The farmers will be better served by improvement in the utilisation of existing dams than even building new ones,” Kabiru said.
Nigeria has a total of 264 dams with a combined storage capacity of 33 BCM of water for multipurpose uses, of which 210 are owned by the Federal Government, 34 by the states, and 20 are owned by private organisations, according to the Federal Ministry of Water Resources.
Chief Executive Officer of X-Ray Farms, AfricanFarmer Mogaji, said majority of the few operating river basins cannot access water because most of their canals have been blocked by sand, such that the water flowing through for farmers has been reduced by more than half.
Industry watchers say while this problem can be quickly and cheaply resolved by basic servicing, the benefits are immense.
“There are river basins shut out from thousands of acres of farmlands because the people did not desilt it, and these are concrete canals that just need to be desilted,” said Mogaji.
“Some dams also need funding as they have some of their parts collapsed,” he noted.
